20 November 2014

SharePoint Solution For Customized Archiving Released

Today we have released a new kalmstrom.com SharePoint Solution – SP Archive. The application lets organizations archive SharePoint data in a customized way, to avoid problems with SharePoint list items limits, and as SP Archive saves the list items to a database it is also suitable for backup.

kalmstrom.com Senior Developer Jitu Patidar is our guest blogger today. He has been responsible for the development of SP Archive, and he will tell more about our new kalmstrom.com Solution.

Problem: SharePoint list limits
SharePoint lists have a limit of 5000 rows. When you exceed the list limit you will have problems, so some kind of archiving is necessary. That is why we have developed SP Archive. We wanted to give users of kalmstrom.com SharePoint Solutions a better archiving option than the workflow we had offered earlier.

Solution: Archive to database
When it comes to archiving, a database has considerable advantages to a SharePoint site. Databases are built to handle many items, while SharePoint in the first place is built for sharing.

Because of the database benefits we decided to let the first version of our new kalmstrom.com Solution archive to Microsoft Access or SQL Server. Next version of SP Archive will give a possibility to archive to SharePoint lists also, for those who prefer that.

Customized Archiving
From the start we decided that SP Archive must let users decide exactly what items and fields should be archived, and the selection must be easy to make and change. We also wanted to give the possibility to use several databases with SP Archive, for example different databases for different lists or SharePoint sites.

We created a Settings dialog, where SharePoint sites and lists are added to SP Archive and an Archiving dialog where users select first SharePoint list, then fields and finally items to archive. The selection of items is simplified by numerous filtering options.

Excel reportsWhen the selection is done, there is a possibility to export the selected items and fields to an Excel sheet. It gives a quick overview of the data you have exported. Attachments can be included in the archiving to the database, but they are not included in the Excel export.

Archive or backup
When you archive old or unused SharePoint list items to a database you probably don't want to keep them in SharePoint, because of the 5000 items list limit. But we have not developed SP Archive to automatically remove the archived items from SharePoint. Instead we give the option to either remove the items or keep them in SharePoint, and that way SP Archive may be used for backup of SharePoint list items too.

SP Archive remembers
We think people often want to archive items from the same list in the same way, and therefore we have made SP Archive remember the field selection and filter option choice. This way the archiving or backup will be very quick after the first time.

Small teamSP Archive is a comparatively small-scale solution, so we have only been two developers working actively with the development. Junior Developer Ankit Raghuvansi made much of the actual coding under my supervision. But the whole team has studied SP Archive, and their comments and enhancement suggestions have been very valuable. Thank you all!

Subscribe or get for free
If your organization already subscribe to a kalmstrom.com SharePoint solution, you don't have to start a new, separate subscription to SP Archive.
From today SP Archive will be included in your current subscription, so please contact us and we will send you a key.

Should your organization not be using a kalmstrom.com SharePoint Solution yet,
you are welcome to subscribe to SP Archive. Because even if we developed SP Archive for our subscribers, this solution is beneficial to all SharePoint users!

Try SP Archive!
Whether you are a kalmstrom.com Community Member or not, you are very welcome to download SP Archive and evaluate the solution for 30 days without any obligations. If you have questions, I am here to assist you together with my colleagues in the kalmstrom.com Support team.